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So Physalis (aka "Ground cherry", aka "Chinese lanterns", aka "Cape goosberries") are a sort of weedy little plant, but some of them produce edible little fruits encased in a papery little container.
The fruit have a surprising flavour which is pleasant in small doses.
Anyway, I'm proposing that
the fruit could carefully be removed from the husk and replaced with a small amount of dried tea, and the opening sewn up, to produce a mildly interesting tea-bag.
If it works it would probably scale up reasonably well, if you can grow physalis reasonably cheaply, labour is cheap, the fruit can be reused or sold and you can sell the teabags at a premium.
[link]
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Is physalis husk permeable? |
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Good question.
I forgot to mention that I have an apparently unrelated and non-edible plant in my garden, and if you leave the lanterns on the husk sometimes rots away to leave a filigree 'skeleton'.
I'm not sure you'd be able to do that while still using the berry, assuming you wanted it. But if not, and the shell isn't permeable enough, it should be possible to punch some holes in the shell to make it so. |
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Yes, I think that would work, too, and the seedpods are shaped more like the traditional tea-bag. Good idea.
But we should ask nineteenthly about toxicity of these at some point. |
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You could potentially achieve the same thing by making a sort of flat "sheet" out of plant fibres, perforating it, and sealing it up as a sort of "bag". |
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That's pretty high-tech, [MB]. There are a lot of issues to address, like getting the fibres to adhere reliably, and making the perforations. |
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Would not some sort of mesh of plastic, or stainless steel, be better ? |
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Perhaps it could be made impermeable, some kind of hard waterproof mineral substance. Minimise the perforation problems by having just two perforations, one for water ingress and one for egress. |
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